How often we have seen a people hasten toward its own destruction after the fashion of the collective suicide of lemmings. One has only to think of soldiers proudly marching off to war in 1914; of the masochistic hecatomb of the Chinese Cultural Revolution; or of nations glorifying the Ubuesque program of the Nazis and cheering on the crimes of Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, or Milosevic.
In earlier days, however, passions were easily aroused by the drumbeat of nationalism and the banners of military delusion. Suicidal tendencies were readily draped in the shrouds of an imbecilic glory. By contrast, the totalitarianism of money kills without deception or appeal to the emotions: predatory greed replaces arbitrary reason.
But what impassiveness does not cover up some great affective turmoil? Behind the cold-hearted monster of egoistic calculation the creeping chaos of frustration is ever active. The swarming maggots of life unfulfilled complete the dauntless work of voracious market forces
As Ernst Wiechert notes apropos of Nazism, “From the infinite multiplicity of modest lives by no means reconstructed arose a horror that ravaged the earth and the human heart along with it.”
The party of death has a morbid attraction for those whom the rule of greed and programmed despair has convinced to give up on life. More than ever before, this sick fascination is sufficient unto itself. The religious or ideological rationales that it still occasionally masquerades behind are really more like cheap adornments than real disguises. Henceforth “pure and purifying” hate will be the sole motive for placing bombs and instigating massacres.
Though seemingly unforeseen, the scourge of suicide, the galvanizing of death worshippers and the proliferation of kamikaze attacks are really just epiphenomena of the everyday inhumanity that thrives on the dung heap of predation, degrades mores and spurs regression to a barbarous past. Such is the agonizing and angst-ridden life which populism sustains by palliative means, setting ethnic, religious, ideological, competing or sports-based communities against one another in merciless conflicts that give an illusory meaning to death. To the murderous insanity thrown up by existential suffering, such populism lends the wings of reason and relevance.
Whether individual or collective, all killing is now part of a war waged by the partisans of death against those committed to life. Ethical appeals and humanitarian sermons have not the slightest effect on explosions of hatred. Only the call for happiness, echoed by one and all, can put an end to them.
Wherever love triumphs over hate, life reasserts its absolute sovereignty. Such love flows not from divine grace, nor from good intentions, nor from New Age mysticism. As the passion of lovers demonstrates, it is the route that life’s generosity takes, despite all barriers and opposition, never halting, avoiding ambushes and sidestepping or destroying all obstacles in its path.
The most varied and often the most laughable excuses are offered as hasty justifications for mindless violence and barbarity. The exacerbation of inhumanity and the tactic of scapegoating reflect deliberate actions by state, populist and business mafias hungry to maximize the final profit from the organization of chaos.
If I have so often emphasized the reasons for the unleashing of “ordinary” hate—the thought processes of beings who are dissociated from themselves, denatured and turned into their own worst enemies—it is not out of any claim to clairvoyance or any obsessive tendency on my part but simply to evoke an ever-more-apparent development: I have the feeling that our lost unity is being restored, this as a reaction to the horrendous conditions imposed on individuals and societies, fragmenting and privatizing them and stripping them of all solidarity.
Commitment to life is always in play, continually rising from its ashes, ever ready to illuminate us with the light of its flame.
The paradoxical situation that confronts us is, on the one hand, that everyone has a hazy perception of the subterranean roiling of the volcano whose smoking fumaroles signal the imminence of a social eruption, as witness the recent uprisings in the Maghreb. At the same time the spinelessness of what La Boétie called voluntary servitude transforms the masses into swarming larvae kowtowing to every dictatorial measure enforced by the State at the behest of international financial powers. The results include the degradation of education, health care, social services, public transport, postal delivery, pensions; the decline of the main industrial production sectors (steel, textiles, agriculture); the adulteration of foodstuffs; the hijacking of drinking water; the commandeering of alternative and free energy sources; and chemical, nuclear and pharmaceutical pollution.
Such is your legacy from the fatalism, apathy, and resignation of the older generations, from those who precipitated you into this world with no attempt to help you avoid the bastardization of body and consciousness engendered by commodities, money, power and an economic system which, after reducing life to survival, now threatens every life-form on the planet.